Cosmo Authentic World Kitchen West Quay VIP Opening

Cosmo World Kitchen has officially come to Southampton and I was lucky enough to be invited to the VIP opening. Want to know what it was like? Read on to see what I thought…

Last week, I was invited* to try out one of the newest restaurants to open up in Southampton’s West Quay Shopping Centre. Despite never having heard of the Cosmo restaurant brand beforehand, I am always happy to try new foods (So long as there is a vegetarian option of course).

Although the restaurant had already opened this event was the official VIP launch of the restaurant that lots of important people and influencers of Southampton were invited to. This included the Sherrif of Southampton, the Daily Echo, various media influencers and other local bloggers. I arrived just in time to see a speech given by the restaurant owner and the ribbon being cut by the Sherrif for the official opening. We were then given the opportunity to have a look around, take photos, ask questions and find a seat and tuck into some of the lovely food on offer!

What is Cosmo?

Cosmo is a buffet style restaurant that brings a variety of food from around the World all in one place for you to try. The price varies anywhere from £8.50 to £16.99 depending on what time and day of the week you’re going. As I was invited for a complimentary meal, I believe that you pay a set price for entry and pay for your drinks inside the restaurant upon leaving.

If you’re going out for a meal with a group of friends and can’t decide on a specific restaurant then Cosmo would make a perfect choice, especially for those that are fussy eaters with the amount of choice you get to choose from! It ranges from fast food, Oriental, spice, carvery and a large selection of desserts. Read more here.

The meal

Once you have entered the restaurant, all you need to do is find a table and take a seat. A waiter will then take your order for a drink and then you are free to help yourself to whatever takes your fancy. I decided to just order a soft drink which has free refills, so I had a fizzy orange drink (Not sure what it was called exactly). The food is all cooked in the centre of the buffet in an open kitchen so you can see the chefs cooking away while you pick your food. The kitchen/buffet goes around the room in a circular shape with various continental food set in sections so you are easily able to walk around it.

I decided to choose a selection of food so I could basically try a bit of everything. Confession time: I was a wee bit of a fatty and had two plates as I couldn’t fit everything I wanted on to one plate. *Insert facepalm emoji here* My plate of food contained, cheesy mozzarella bites, battered mushrooms, chips (of course, I had a separate plate for these as I cannot say no to chips!), spring rolls, onion bhajis, samosas, vegetarian sushi, Yorkshire Pudding, egg noodles, egg fried rice, naan bread, pizza – basically I ate a lot!

The food that I enjoyed most was the egg fried rice, naan bread, pizza, mozzarella bites. The egg fried rice was just the right amount of stickiness, making it easy to eat and had the right amount of egg taste to it. The naan didn’t taste too doughy or stodgy but had a nice crispy taste to it and as I had just taken it off the hot plate the warmth just created more taste to it. The pizza base was nice and crispy with a decent amount of cheese and didn’t have an overbearing tomato based sauce which is always good in my books. As you can probably tell, I am a big lover of cheese especially of the melted variety and I think this part of the reason I enjoyed the mozzarella bites so much. The breadcrumbs were crispy and non-greasy in the slightest. Just thinking about them makes my mouth water a little!

Now it wouldn’t be an honest review if I didn’t mention some of the food that I wasn’t too keen on but I would just like to point out this wasn’t the restaurant’s fault it’s probably more just me with my taste buds. I wasn’t a particularly big fan of the onion bhajis’ and the samosas which I can’t exactly say why but I think it was probably due to the spice.

The pudding

I was rather naughty and didn’t finish my whole plate of food… What would my parents say!? Haha.
Although I was rather full, I have this mentality that if I want pudding then I’m full of main food but not for a pudding. Does anyone else have that or just me?

Likewise, with the main food, there were so many choices to eat for pudding which ranged from fruit, a selection of cakes, ice cream, pancakes, jelly, pic n’ mix sweets and a magnificent chocolate fountain which you could dip marshmallows in to.

I wasn’t really feeling cakes or a healthy dessert so I went with a plate of sweets, pancakes, a couple of scoops of ice cream and a couple of chocolate dipped marshmallows. The pancakes were okay but they were cold which was due to being made by a machine and then you helped yourself, so they had probably been sat around for a while. Plus I much prefer American fluffy pancakes so that’s probably more me and my preferences than Cosmo.

For the ice cream, I chose mint and vanilla flavour which were both incredibly creamy but also tasted incredibly light too. Out of the two, I preferred vanilla but I’m a simple girl when it comes to ice cream as I just fricking love vanilla, okay.

The sweets just tasted like Haribo Fangtastics and mix packets which isn’t a bad thing at all as I love Haribo. I also really enjoyed the chocolate dipped marshmallows as I had never tried eating them this way before and it was just a bit different. Although I would probably advise not eating too many as they can a bit sickly.

Would I come back?

Overall, I really enjoyed my experience of Cosmo and I would definitely come back with Greg, family and friends. For the amount you can eat the food is all reasonably priced and tastes great too. The only thing I would say is to be careful about how many drinks you order as that could potentially be expensive. Although having said that you could easily order several drinks and have food for around £30 which I think is a reasonable amount to spend when eating out.